Architectural flexibility in a software-system's life-cycle: systematic construction and exploitation of flexibility

Software evolution is omnipresent and only with adequate flexibility it can be mastered in time and budget. Flexibility is supported by many architectural mechanisms, but more methodological support for a life-cycle-phases bridging approach of flexibility is still desirable. Therefore, in this paper we contribute a life-cycle-phases bridging approach for flexibility. Our approach supports architects during system design to achieve flexibility and during system evolution to exploit flexibility. We build on existing flexibility analysis techniques and extend them to give architects specific guidance and tool-support. For architecture design, we introduce an automated flexibility analysis with real-time feedback in architecture tools. For software evolution we provide a flexibility exploitation analysis which builds up on the results of the design time analysis and enables effective utilization of provided flexibility by deriving flexibility-aware work-plans. We demonstrate our approach by applying it to a checkin system, report first validation results from an empirical study and propose further validation activities.